He was too perfect, despite being one of the most imperfect people I knew.

I realized I’m in love. It's always been right in front of me.

Just when you think you have it all figured out, an epiphany arrives at the higher level of one's consciousness.

I could not but wonder at the queen's unprecedented civility, until I realized with a flush of shame that it was my own improved behavior that motivated hers. So it is that we in life determine our own treatment.

Your greatest awakening comes, when you are aware about your infinite nature.

I was terrified as only grown men and women can be when they wake in the middle of the night and begin to realize, in the absolute silence and solitude all around them, that it is not only their dream that has woken them, that it is their whole way of life.

I remembered reading somewhere that if you smile at something, it automatically makes you happier.

I didn't leave right away. I stayed in the woods. I heard the faint voices of other people. I felt the cold against my skin. But mostly, I was aware of my own heavy breathing, my own thoughts, my own past, present, and future. I realized then, and would have to keep realizing in all the years to come: It didn't matter if I was the kind of girl who had sex, of the kind of girl who had her portrait on a wall in the library, or the kind of girl who got into the best college, or the kind of girl who didn't tell her parents everything, or the kind of girl who teachers loved. I just needed to be okay with all the kinds of girl I was.

In another 2,400 years, even Socrates, the most well-known genius of the century, might be forgotten. The future will erase everything--there's no level of fame or genius that allows you to transcend oblivion. The infinite future makes that kind of mattering impossible.

Everything we come across becomes a part of us. It doesn't matter how small or insignificant it is…or how devastating. One story here, one story there, that’s what I see when I look back at my life. An accumulation of everything I went through.

One of life's challenging realizations is that sometimes you outgrow your friends.

In trying so hard to win, we have instead become exactly like those whom we hate. The key is to know that there is no need to exert an effort to win; for we were already winners in the beginning when we were not like them. It's when we try so hard to overcome them that we become like them, without realizing that we were already victors in the very beginning.

The thing was, the places of your life, like the clothes you wore and the car you drove and the friends and associates you had, were a product of the way you lived.

You live your life without realizing these things until you take yourself away from the usual stuff, even for a brief moment…only then do you see your life in a different perspective.

We only betray ourselves. No one is betrayed except by himself. One way to betray yourself is to try to be too many people at once."How many people should a person try to be in your opinion?"One at the most. Most people don't even succeed in that.

We only betray ourselves.

...The lies we tell, and let ourselves believe, in the name of love.The first thing you should know is that everyone lies. The second thing is that it matters.

But for a long time, and probably far too long, I had a secret wish: the adolescently romantic idea that there was someone out there for me; someone I hadn't met yet who would ask me on a date and make sense of my life. I harbored the hope, I'm now embarrassed to admit, that like a girl in a Lifetime movie, I would look into someone's eyes and find a reflection of my inner life. But sometime between my teenage years and the first years in New York, that idea had pretty well evaporated. I'd grown up.

Change rarely happens in doses large enough to choke you. Everyday you swallow a little more and expect a little less.

I have lost patience with the idea of an insignificant human being standing up above the rest of us--whether he is called Reverend or Doctor or Judge--and shouting at us all about this thing or that. As soon as someone starts to pontificate in this way, I am apt to cut him off or leave the room, or, if this can't be done gracefully, I simply arrange that sweet vapid smile on my face that was so useful during the trial but that so infuriates Dr. Cole. After all, I have already taken the measure of my own insignificance, and I survived.

Life was fragile and love was, too. At any moment, even our happiest ones, our world could shatter and we wouldn’t see it coming. There was only more loss ahead, showing its ugly face when we least expected it.